Meta Tags and Keywords

[The Magus]

Hi,

I have been hearing and noticing comments to the effect that Search Engines are no longer paying much attention to Keyword Meta tags. For one, I noticed comments that Google no long pay attention to them - wonder about minor search engines.

It has been implied that it is pointless to include them.

Can anyone confirm this???

I presume it is still worthwhile to include the various other tags such as language, title, copyright etc etc. There must be some value to them.

Cheers

Jack

[AdamGundry]

As far as I'm aware, the GoogleBot and the crawlers of other major search engines now use full text search, but yes, minor search engines may still use them so it could be useful to retain them.

Adam

[Compguy Pete]

Well if you have meta tag keywords (which you should still do) the googlebot will cross check those words and how they relate to the content. The better you do the higher your site will be indexed.

However this can still be done without using keywords at all.

[The Magus]

Thanks for the replies however the last comment from Compguy Pete that it can all be done without interests me.

What do you mean - do you mean that the search engine would do the same job if the keywords were not even there?

Thanks

Jack

[Compguy Pete]

The googlebot will crawl your page, index the repeated words and/or not so common words. And list your site via that information.

It would be in your best interest to mention 'key words' as often as posssible.

This does not mean you should 'hide text", making the text the same color as your background. Google would consider this spaming and could de-index your site.